Seeking rhythmic attunement: Teaching to dance; dancing to teach

Abstract

Resisting a deep-seated technical perspective of education, I attend to the notion of attunement as a key concept with which to imagine curriculum as a complicated conversation. As fully appreciating the meaning and potential of attunement requires an embodied sense of the word that is deployed by working from within our bodily, social, and autobiographical experiences, I explore the notion of attunement in two of my own educational experiences: learning the Lindy Hop and teaching English. In doing so, I weave the Deweyan notion of habits into the discussion. I apply my search for rhythmic attunement (1) to partners’ and students’ becoming, (2) to the emerging creative processes of aesthetic/educative experience, and (3) to the yet-to-come through impulse and reflection by theorizing my habits as sensitivity, art, and constant renewals. I hope that my lived account of what attunement may feel and look like in education contributes to enhancing the understanding of what curricular and pedagogical practices may entail when teachers are not reduced to mere technicians. I hope to encourage educators to become nuanced dancers who constantly interpret and reinterpret the moves they have learned and willingly reimagine them while responding to ever-changing educational contexts and relationships.

Keywords:

• Attunement
• curriculum as conversation
• habits
• John Dewey
• learning the Lindy Hop
• teaching English (as a foreign language)

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Greene has “complimentary yet critical relationships” to Dewey’s thoughts on progressive education (Giarelli, 2016, p. 7). Regardless of Dewey’s relatively overly optimistic view on social transformation and his neglect of the voices of marginalized others, it is still critical to acknowledge that his understanding of actions as “an invasion of the future, of the unknown” (Dewey, 1922, p. 12) resonates with Greene’s (1995) consideration of “what is not yet” as key in understanding and imagining education.

2 While I was aware of its cultural origin when I first began dancing the Lindy Hop in 2007, it was not until recently that I became more critically aware of the fact that I have been influenced mostly by white dancers and rarely introduced to black dancers and that I can enjoy the Lindy Hop from a position of privilege without having to know, experience, or worry about the personal as well as systemic racial discriminations and ignorance that black dancers have long faced on and off the dance floor. I encourage readers to refer to McCarthy-Brown (2018) and Brown and Kopano (2014) for gaining awareness of the cultural appropriation of the Lindy Hop. In order to gain a lived sense of black dancers through the life and career of Frankie Manning, a pioneering Lindy Hopper, refer to Manning and Millman (2007); also visit the Frankie Manning Foundation (https://www.frankiemanningfoundation.org) to see how today’s Lindy Hoppers try to carry on Manning’s legacy. I also encourage readers to refer to Yehoodi Swings (2017) and Swungover (2018) and listen to the voices of contemporary black dancers sharing their experiences in current Lindy Hop communities, their responses to the cultural appropriation of the dance form, and their hopes for the future of the dance and dance communities.

3 Pseudonym

4 Composite characterization derived from my social dancing experiences with various dancers.

5 The students in this narrative are composite characters derived from my teaching experiences of seventh grade students at SYC.

6 VTS is “a method engaging learners in deep experiences looking at art and discussing meaning with peers, a process that…furthers visual literacy” (Hailey, Miller, & Yenawine, 2015, p. 49).

7 I agree with Wade (2011) that the Lindy Hop, by requiring dancers to constantly negotiate the power beyond “the gender binary” (p. 243), offers a “feminist model of male/female relations” (p. 244).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Soon Ye Hwang

Soon Ye Hwang received her Ph.D. in teaching, curriculum, and learning from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (United States). She is interested in empowering pre- and in-service teachers to participate in theorizing their teaching and learning through philosophical, aesthetic, and autobiographical curricular conversations. Soon Ye has published on topics including creativity as present in expression, arts-mediated curriculum, and curriculum as collective improvisation.